Chapter 9 #2
He watched her ruin her cuffs to the elbow. He watched her make a butchery of her first mackerel, and a worse butchery of her second, and laugh at herself with her whole throat, head back, gulls startling. The sound of that laugh went through him like warm wine.
He watched the ox try not to laugh and lose, one short bark like a hatch cover dropping.
He watched the knife handed over, and the thick red hands closing over Lucy’s white ones to set the angle of the blade, and the third fish come apart clean, and something pass between the two women at the trestle that no money he possessed could have purchased.
Then the talking began, and it was Lucy who did the listening.
He was too far off for words. The fishwife’s knife pointed out to the boats, to one boat, her chin tipping toward the two owl-eyed boys, and the boys summoned, dripping, to be named.
A hand pressed flat to her breastbone, once, and held there, at something.
And Lucy through it all barely speaking, her head tipped, her whole body turned into an ear, taking the woman’s life into herself the way dry ground takes rain.
The boys were leaning against the trestle now. An old man had drifted into the orbit of it and was contributing opinions on gulls. Somewhere in the hour, a mug of something had appeared at Lucy’s elbow, and that was the moment Lorenzo understood she was being accepted.
The wind turned the page of his book for him. The page was empty.
He stared down at it, and it came to him, arriving around him, that an hour had gone by, a whole hour of a bright May morning, two miles downwind of everything his family had bled for since before the Spanish Armada sailed on England, and he had not thought of Matteo once.
Not once. He examined the hour and could not find his ancestor anywhere in it.
The alarm rang in him from habit, from far off, like a bell in another parish. He waited to mind.
He found he did not mind.
He wrote the date at the top of the empty page, because it appeared to him that something had happened on this day, and closed the book.
They had mackerel for supper, and no one had bought it.
It was thrust upon Lucy at the trestle at day’s end, six fat fish strung on a withy, with a growl that defied her to refuse, and the innkeeper’s wife dressed them, and the innkeeper, who two nights past had left the room rather than discuss the island, stood over the table telling them where the fish had been swimming that morning, easy as an old friend.
The word island still stood scowling in the corner of the room, but the house had warmed a degree, and Lorenzo ate his supper slowly and marveled at his Lucy’s skills.
She would make a fine wife. His own family would one day forgive that she was not Italian and accept her as she was, if today was anything to judge by.
“Tomorrow,” Lucy said, when Bessy had gone up and the innkeeper’s family had withdrawn to their kitchen and the two of them sat on in the little parlor that the household surrendered to them for the evening, a betrothed pair being, in the eyes of a busy inn, as good as wed, “Mrs. Hannaford is teaching me to mend a net. And you are to come and be shown to her properly. She thinks you are a painter. I let her. It made you seem harmless.”
“Harmless,” said Lorenzo.
“Entirely harmless. A lamb with a sketching-book.”
The fire had burned down to a red glow. The house creaked and ticked above them.
The sea breathed against the shingle outside, long and slow.
Her face was lit warm all down one side, and her hair was giving up the day’s pins by installments.
Lorenzo gazed at her and had no more command of what came next than a man has of weather.
The soft line of her throat, the way the fire caught the curve of her lower lip, the faint scent of cider and sea air that clung to her …
he felt it all settle low and warm in his body.
“You were magnificent today,” he said. “I watched you win a village that would not be bought, and you took it by giving. I have never seen anything so …” The English word went missing.
He went and fetched it. “So shrewd and so kind in the one act. If I forget every fish in the sea, I will not forget your face when the third one came apart properly. Dio, the pride on you. A victorious general at a surrender has never looked so proud.”
“It was a very good fish.” Her voice had gone unsteady at the edges. She was staring at his mouth.
“Lucia,” he said, warning her, or himself. The distinction was already lost.
“Lucia,” she repeated. “I like that.”
“I will stop if—”
“Don’t you dare.”
Afterward, he could not have testified which of them moved. There was the fire, and her face, and then the world had her mouth in it and nothing else. Soft, and certain of him, and tasting faintly of cider.
He felt the soft press of her lips against his, and the way they parted under the slow stroke of his tongue. She answered him at once, thorough and unhurried, her tongue sliding against his with a heat that went straight down his spine.
Her hands were at his collar. His were in the ruin of her pins, doing further ruin.
The chair was in the way, and he moved it.
A length of time passed in the little parlor that was made of breath and wool and the blind little adjustments of two people trying to stand closer together than standing allows.
The rounded edge of her jaw under his thumb.
The lush give of her body against his. The smell of her, cider and salt and woman, filling his head until thought went thin.
He could feel the press of her full breasts against his chest, the way her rounded hips settled into the hard line of him, and the want of her made his blood thick and slow.
“Someone will come down,” she whispered, without conviction and without stopping.
Nobody came down. But the parlor had one candle and a window on the street, and there was a kind of madness that still allowed for the counting of windows, and it was that madness, no nobler one, that took them, hushed and hurrying like thieves in their own inn, up the crooked stair to the little room at the stair-head where his trunk lived.
The ceiling sloped to the eaves. The candle he carried showed a bed, a chair, a washstand, a window full of dark sea. There was hardly floor enough for the two of them to stand in it.
They did not need floor. He set the candle down with the care of a drunk man and then she was in his arms again, and the latch clicked under his blind hand behind her, and the sea filled up the silence so that everything they did seemed to happen inside that silence.
He had meant, insofar as a man on fire means anything, a kiss. The kiss of the parlor, concluded honestly, and then her door across the passage closed with her inside her bedchamber and himself left to walk his blood cool by the harbor. That was the plan as he understood it.
The plan did not survive her.
It did not survive the discovery that the ribbon at the neck of her gown answered a single pull.
The fabric loosened and fell open at her throat.
It did not survive the sound she made, felt more than heard, a low hum against his mouth, when his lips found the pulse below her ear and opened there, tasting the salt and the heat of her skin.
It did not survive her fingers, which tugged his shirt from his breeches before his conscience caught them.
The cool air of the room touched the skin of his chest where her hands had opened him.
“Lucia. Tesoro. We must—”
Her mouth arrived and disagreed with him, thoroughly. She kissed him deep, her tongue sliding against his with deliberate heat, and when he surfaced, he had lost the sentence and his cravat. He had taught her too well about kissing.
“We are not yet—”
“I know what we are not yet.” Her whisper was ragged and laughing both.
Her eyes in the candlelight were enormous, fearless, quite black with passion.
“I know exactly the sum of what I am owed at the church door, and I am not asking for the principal, signore. But I have stood on the outside of my own life for years, and you look at me that way, and I find …”
His hand had moved of itself, tracing the line of her throat to where the loosened gown gave up its border. The soft upper curve of her breast filled his palm.
Her breath went, and the sentence went with it, and she finished on almost no voice at all. “I find I do not want to be proper. Not tonight.”
There was a word for what he ought to do, and the word was in the passage, with her door, and the plan.
“Then hear the terms,” he heard himself say instead, low, against her temple, his own voice gone to gravel and Italy.
“Nothing that cannot wait for a ring, waits. That is mine and it does not move, amore, do not test it, it is nailed down. But there is a whole country on this side of that border.” He drew back the inch it took to see her face, because this she would say yes or no to with her eyes open or not at all.
“Let me. Only let me. You are to do nothing, give nothing, you are only to be. It is a scandal how a man may study a woman and never—”
“Lorenzo?”
“Sì.”
“You are talking.”
“Sì,” he admitted, and stopped.
He was thorough. He had been called nothing else his whole life. Thorough, obsessive, incapable of half a glance, and it had cost him friends and eaten his years. Yet here, at last, on a sloping-ceilinged night that smelled of tallow and the sea, the vice paid out its full worth.
He learned her the way he had learned altarpieces, slowly, in wonder, giving each discovery its full weight before permitting himself the next. The candle got the best of the bargain, and he envied it.